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Washed out skin tone---help! [finished]

So I tried to fix my previous woman's face and flesh out the skintone. Beforehand her anatomy is obviously off and she's basically white. I feel like I've pushed it a bit further and corrected some of the anatomical issues, but I'm sure I could improve.

Any tips? Advice?

I want to keep pushing it. Will post final product soon since I finally have time to draw again (quit my second job) and want to get better.

[EDIT: I think I've spent as much time on this as I'm prepared to. Time to move onto newer things. Below you'll see my progress from bottom to top.]

Colors and saturation are totally relative. I'd suggest darkening, working on, rendering the woman's hair. That will give you a better idea of where you're at. Reference will definitely help. Keep in mind that skin has blood running righttt beneath it. You'll need to think about touches of warmth and cool in certain areas.

The Following User Says Thank You to rseward For This Useful Post:

Get the structure correct before you worry about colors. Painting a lot of portraits in grayscale are an efficient means to learn to paint the form itself properly, but start with the basics - cubes, spheres and cones - and expand from there.

Agree w hexo. You need to work on your drawing skills. Just curious: you said you know the anatomy is off. So why not fix it first? You aren't helping yourself by spending so much time on skintones when you need to work on anatomy. It's like worrying about painting a car and worrying about a spotless finish when it has a bunch of big dents in it...

Avvatar: Yes, I'll put it below. Although I made the really dumb decision to use a girl with a different skin color. (I'm bad enough drawing white girls, and I am a white girl)

rseward: Thanks for the link. Really great advice, I'll try to keep it in mind for the future. I know I need to work on the hair. I have the worst habit of being a stickler when something in a painting makes me unhappy. I'll just try to grind it down into submisson, neglecting the painting as a whole. Trying to work on it.

Hexo: I love Loomis and probably bring out the books again. Somehow I need to make painting cubes and cones interesting.

LAG: At first the anatomy was way worse, so I spent a lot of time adjusting it. Right now I know her face is still 'off' but my eye's not good enough to say how, exactly. And I keep going at it because I'm stubborn as hell and won't let something go if it isn't working. (a huge problem of mine.)

Here's a small update. I hope this looks a little better. I've checked the proportions by drawing lines with the pen tool. I've flipped it every which way. Still I know it's not right but I can't put my finger on it. Her nose is too long right? How am I mucking this up? Also, the reference.

Right now I know her face is still 'off' but my eye's not good enough to say how, exactly.

So don't rely on your eye. Here are two options:

1. The easier one. Overlay your painting on top of the photo you used as reference, scaling it to the same size. Play with opacity. You'll see all the deviations in proportions that you have made.

2. The harder one. Desaturate the painting, make it much lighter but not totally invisible, and trace the construction lines on top of it. The center line, the horizontal lines, the symmetric features. You'll see all the deviations from symmetry and perspective you have made.

If you do that and you still cannot see the deviations, stop painting portraits and go back to studying formal perspective with cubes for a while.

That said, it's not worth your while to paint something until you have a good solid drawing. Fixing the drawing after you painted it wastes too much work. It is better to spend more time planning, less time painting, than the other way.

The Following User Says Thank You to arenhaus For This Useful Post:

Arenhaus: I did exactly what you said. Here's a quick sketch-over of the features. The eyes are higher than the reference and her nose is longer. But I thought you should never copy a photo reference completely. That's why I've always avoided doing paint-overs. Thanks for the help by the way.

Yes, the point of this exercise is to learn what the deviations are so you can do it better next time (or change it by eye, and then compare again).

The reason it's bad to trace is just that it means you won't learn how to actually draw it. But when you're still learning, trying to copy references accurately is a good way to train your eye and get a sense of what looks right.

If you combine training your eye by copying references with learning structure (guidelines, anatomy, formal perspective with cubes, basic 3D shapes, etc.) then a) you won't need to rely on reference so much, and b) when you do rely on reference you can make it look better (and learn from it).

That's basically what learning to draw consists of: first, being accurate with translating what you see to the page, and second, understanding it so you can make up your own pictures. (Note: Even masters don't entirely make up their own image -- they reference heavily because the real world is so complex it's hard to understand it all from memory. But masters also have skill at choosing their references, or making their own.)

You said you need to make painting cubes and cones interesting. Sure do! If you're mindlessly copying them it won't be as helpful as if you're thinking about how it's useful, putting them in context, thinking about them. As you can see from my sketchbook, I'm a fan of annotating my stuff because I find making it explicit both more fun and more useful. But you could make it interesting in other ways, such as drawing examples of things you see around you or things you like just using the basic shapes.

For example, let's say you're practicing spheres and you have a thing for bald guys. Or maybe you don't necessarily have a thing for them, but you at least find them more interesting than drawing endless red balls. After you do a couple nice shaded balls, you can put this into practice by drawing Patrick Stewart. Then you can practice reflected colour by drawing him leaning against a blue wall. Or whatever. This is kind of a convoluted example and it might be more efficient to use simpler ones, but you get the idea.

The Following 2 Users Say Thank You to Lulie For This Useful Post:

Although this thread seems to be focusing on anatomy issues rather than your fist question regarding skin tone, I just wanted to say that using too much white can create problems in skin tone. My painting prof told me a trick to skin saying simply, don't use white, use yellow to lighten. However, your more recent working of the portrait looks much better, good job!

The Following User Says Thank You to SCrane For This Useful Post:

SCrane: That might be useful as a rule of thumb, but note it won't work if
- You're painting the specular highlights (the shiny reflections that women powder their nose to minimise -- they take on the colour of the light source),
- You're already using quite warm tones in your mixing (don't want to make them look orange...),
- The scene has a colour cast (e.g. the light source in the scene has a coloured tint, like a blue spotlight), which shifts everything to a particular colour that means the actual paints you use for the skin need to be more blue-grey than yellow for them to look right,
- You're drawing someone with quite cool tinted skin (for example sometimes very pale people, and no doubt certain ethnicities have cooler skin tones than others).

You could use yellow as a base and then mix in blues or whatever to adjust to taste, but relying on that rule of thumb will lead to a lot of unnecessary mixing. Instead, try to understand colour mixing in terms of 3D space. (Also see this page for more examples and how to think about colour mixing.) Once you understand that, all you really need to do is have the desired colour in mind and it becomes natural to mix to it. (Of course there are dozens of tricks that can help too, but this is the fundamental idea.)

I think the main issue with the skin tone here is simply not being sure what it should be. This could be fixed by referencing the colour of someone with the desired skin tone, rather than someone of a different ethnicity and then guessing.

The Following User Says Thank You to Lulie For This Useful Post:

Lulie: Haha one quick sketch of Patrick Stewart coming up. Also, thanks for the lay down of the knowledge. Those links you posted will be a great help while I'm trying to sharpen my rendering skills.

Scrane: I tried throwing a little bit of yellow in there. But I think Lulie had a point, choosing a reference with a woman of a different race than my piece probably messed me up. Thanks for the encouragement.

Here is the latest head shot of the girl. The right hand side/ shadowed part of her face bothers me tremendously, but I feel like there's not much more I can do at this point. I think I'll work on it a bit more, throw in the details and call it a day. There is a lot of practicing I have to do, and being a stickler with this piece is starting to grate on me.

Okay I really want to work on something else. I know she isn't perfect, and I'd really love to hear any tips on how to make her look more realistic (specifically the skin). I know her neck is hashed, but I feel like I've learned all I can from this piece. I'm pretty happy with the progress I made though. Any help is much, much appreciated. Thanks everyone!